Ivanka Trump's brand is in crisis as shopper boycott takes hold

Ivanka
Trump speaks at the Republican National
Convention.REUTERS/Mike
Segar

Calls to boycott Ivanka Trump's fashion brand are taking hold.

Critics are urging shoppers to stop spending money at the many
retailers that carry her namesake brand, including Amazon,
Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Dillard's,
Marshalls, and Neiman Marcus.

The anti-Ivanka Trump movement was launched in mid-October by
brand strategist Shannon Coulter.

It gained steam last week when a woman describing herself as
a lifelong Nordstrom customer
posted an open letter to the department store demanding that
it stop selling items from Trump's $100 million clothing and
accessories line.

"The hate speech directed at African Americans, Latinos, Jews,
Muslims, LGBT people, and women by the Trump campaign is
unacceptable and does not seem to represent Nordstrom's values,"
she wrote, according to a copy of the letter that she posted on
Twitter. "Yet Ms. Trump continues to defend it, and Nordstrom
continues to defend her."

The letter's author, whose Twitter handle is @shewhovotes, asked
her followers to share the letter if they agree. She tagged the
tweet with the hashtag #GrabYourWallet, which has become a
rallying cry on social media to boycott Trump's brand.

As of Monday, the #GrabYourWallet campaign had more than 119
million impressions on Twitter, which include retweets and likes,
The Wrap reported.

Some celebrities have shown support for the boycott, including
"Ben & Jerry's cofounder Ben Cohen, writer Joyce Carol Oates,
Valerie Bertinelli, Lucy Lawless, and Oscar nominee Don Cheadle,"
according to The Wrap.

There's some evidence that the negative publicity has started
affecting Trump's brand.

Searches for her products online soared between July and October,
Fast Company reported, citing data from ShopRunner. During a
week in October, searches for her products were up more than 335%
over April 2016, according to the data.

But search traffic has taken a nosedive since the start of the
boycott.

"We certainly see in the data, in the last week or two, very much
timed with the boycott, the decline in interest, but hard to say
whether that's just a temporary blip," ShopRunner CMO Angela Song
told Fast Company.

Sheelah Kolhatkar of
The New Yorker wrote in late October that "the darker forces
of her father's political campaign are threatening to ruin
everything" for Trump, and that she is fighting to "salvage her
brand, which is built around young professional women and working
mothers, two groups who appear to be recoiling from her father's
presidential candidacy in large numbers."

"The beauty of America is people can do what they like, but I'd
prefer to talk to the millions, tens of millions of American
women who are inspired by the brand and the message that I've
created," she said.

Nordstrom didn't respond to a request for comment.

However, the woman who posted the open letter on Twitter said the
company sent this message: "As a retailer we work with thousands
of vendors. It would be difficult for us to filter out who and
what they choose to support and then determine the ones we agree
or disagree with. Offering these or other products doesn't imply
we're taking a position."